Afterlife? What about that other place?

Quick Introduction Video:

decided that this year, in this season after
Easter, I wanted to focus on the whole idea of an afterlife. For many people
the promise of heaven is what the Christian faith is all about. In fact there
are Christians who will look you straight in the eye and tell you that
Christian faith and practice is something that you just have to put up with now
for the sake of a tremendous reward later.

I mean, they may not say it in so many words, but the message seems to be: “I don’t
really like all of this churchy stuff and I hardly want to be good and moral
all the time. In fact I’m kind of miserable, but it is only because someday,
after I die I’m going to be able to go to heaven and that will make it all
worthwhile. Heaven, in other words, is supposed to be the carrot that entices
us to be good and that there really is no other good reason to be good.

I have met
many Christians over the years that seem to take that approach and I’ve got to
say that I have never found it compelling. For me, we shouldn’t have to wait
until someday and after we have died in order for this to be worthwhile. I’m
not saying, of course, that our faith should never challenge us by making us
uncomfortable or lead us to do what, in the moment, we don’t feel like doing,
but the blessings that Christ promises us must be for this world, not just for
the next. For that reason, I have often not wanted to dwell on the afterlife
and have not preached on it often. This is not because I don’t believe in it – I
do – but merely because I feel that we have been inclined to put too much
emphasis on it.

But now, I
wanted to counterbalance that tendency by spending some time focussing on the
meaning of the afterlife. But, of course, when you talk about the afterlife,
you can’t just focus on the carrot – the reward that is supposed to be waiting
for us in heaven. There is also, in the Christian tradition, a stick. Again and
again Christians have used the fear of another place – a place called hell – not
to entice people to be good but rather to scare them out of being bad.

Now, hell,
fire and brimstone have not generally been the major themes of the churches
that I have attended over the years. But I do remember one time when I was in
the United States and went, with a group of friends, to visit a Church on a
Sunday morning and I had to sit through about an hour long sermon that was
essentially an exhaustive description of all the pain, terror and suffering
that was surely waiting in Hell for all of those evil people in the world who
did not believe the same thing as the good fellow who was preaching the sermon
that morning.

So I’m not
naive. I know that hell has been a major theme in Christian preaching for a
very long time. For centuries preachers have used imagery of Hell to frighten
people into behaving in certain ways. But not all of that imagery comes from
the Bible. Traditions of and descriptions of Hell have grown and changed
dramatically through the centuries. For example, much of our idea of what Hell
is like comes not from the Bible but from a fourteenth century book called Inferno written by a man named Dante.
Why the word hell itself is not even
a biblical word, it is an Old English word. It was the name for the place that
pagan Anglo-Saxons believed people went after they died. So the question is
what does the Bible actually teach about the place that we affectionately call
hell?

So, as I say,
hell is not a Biblical word. So what is the Biblical word? There are a few. In
the Old Testament, the Hebrew word that is used to describe the place of the
dead is Sheol. It is not entirely clear what Sheol is because no literal
descriptions are offered. One thing that is clear is that they saw it as a real
place underneath the earth. They imagined the universe in very simplistic and
primitive terms. The universe was like a triple layer cake. The top layer was
Heaven above, the middle layer was the earth and the bottom layer was this
place called Sheol. This description of the universe is taken for granted in
many places in the Old Testament, and we should not read it as some kind of
divine revelation of the actual shape of the universe but rather as the Bible
speaking in terms that the people of that time could relate to.

But, in
addition to being a literal place, ancient Hebrews also believed that Sheol was
the place where people went after they died – all people apparently. Sheol for
them was not a place of punishment or torment, but neither was it a place of
reward, it was just kind of a place where you went. We read about their
attitude towards the place in our Psalm this morning: “For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you
praise?” It hardly sounds like much of an existence, does it? No
remembrance, no ability to speak, you are just there. So Sheol doesn’t really
have much connection with our modern concept of hell, for that we need to turn
to the New Testament.

Jesus, in the
New Testament, does indeed talk about a place called hell. Or, at least, he uses a word that got translated into that
Old English word hell in our Bibles.
So, in our reading this morning, Jesus says, “It is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and
to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.” So what kind of a place is Jesus
talking about when he says that?

Well the word
that Jesus actually uses there is the word Gehenna.
Even though the gospels were written in Greek, Gehenna is not a Greek word, it
is an Aramaic word. Aramaic was the language that Jesus actually spoke so that
means that the gospel writers did not translate the word into Greek but
retained the actual word that Jesus probably said. That does not happen often
in the New Testament and it is always important when it does.

So what did
the word Gehenna mean to first century Aramaic speakers like Jesus? Well, that
is the puzzling thing because we know exactly what it meant. Gehenna was an
actual place – I mean a real earthly geographical location that you could
actually visit and can still visit to this very day. Gehenna literally means “the
Valley of the Son of Hinnom” and was an actual piece of land, a valley that had
once belonged to the family of a man named Hinnom. The valley can still be
found to this very day in the City of Jerusalem. It is the valley that is found
on the southern and western side of Mount Zion where the temple of the Lord
once stood and where the Dome of the Rock stands today.

Yet clearly,
when Jesus refers to this place called Gehenna, he had more than just an
ordinary valley outside of Jerusalem in mind. He speaks of it, in fact, as the
very last place you would ever want to go – a place that you would be willing
to pay an arm or a leg (or an eye) not to have to go there. I mean, I have heard
of cities that have bad neighbourhoods but that sounds a little bit extreme!

What’s more,
Jesus describes Gehenna as a place of “unquenchable
fire” and a place “where their worm
never dies, and the fire is never quenched.” What would that have to do
with what is today a fairly ordinary looking valley in the heart of Jerusalem?
Clearly Jesus is using this valley as a metaphor for something. Somehow this
valley carried a meaning that gave people a picture of some truly horrible fate
that awaited some people after they died.

The most
likely explanation seems to be that, in Jesus’ time, this particular valley
just happened to be the place in Jerusalem where people left their garbage. It
was the Jerusalem municipal landfill, the garbage dump. That would certainly
explain why Jesus would speak of it as a place that people would certainly not
want to go – the kind of place that you would give your right arm to not end up
in. People did up living on the local trash heaps, you know. In fact, in some
places people still do. They somehow manage to eke out an existence living off
other people’s garbage but it is not the kind of life that anyone would choose.

It also
explains the imagery of ever burning fires and worms continually feasting on
rotting organic matter. That is exactly the kind of description that you might
take away from your average ancient city dump.

Obviously when
Jesus talks about people ending up in Gehenna, the Jerusalem city dump, he
doesn’t mean that people were going to end up in that literal location. He is
using that place – and it does indeed appear to have been a pretty awful place
– as a metaphor for something that might happen to some people after death. But
what, exactly, is that metaphor supposed to be? Of course, traditionally, the
interpretation of that passage has been that Jesus was saying that, after some
people died, they would be sent to a place where they spend the rest of the
eternity in continual fully conscious torment. I suppose that is possible. But
is that really the only thing that
Jesus could have meant by referring to such a place?

If I were to
say to you, “You’re going to wind up in the dump,” and you knew very well that
you had no business there and that I was not literally sending you on an errand
to the Waterloo Regional Landfill, how would you understand me? Would it seem
that I was consigning you to an eternity of conscious suffering, especially if
I happened to mention that there had been a tire fire burning in the dump
non-stop since last week and the place was full of worms feasting on the garbage?
Well, perhaps. But isn’t it equally possible that I might be rejecting you in
some other way – essentially calling you a piece of garbage or suggesting that
you were useless. Without more information and some context, how could you be
sure what I meant?

And that is
the problem with symbolic language; you can’t quite pin it down and know what
exactly a speaker means. For two thousand years Christians have been thinking
about and adorning the idea of hell with their own imaginations of the worst
kind of torment in this never ending quest to create a stick that they can use
to goad people into behaving in certain ways. But when you go back and try and
load all of that onto a few brief references that Jesus made to a garbage dump
outside of Jerusalem, I can’t help but wonder whether we might be pushing it a
little bit.

Is there a
hell awaiting the wicked of this earth after they die? Well, I can tell you one
thing, I don’t believe that anyone is going to be thrown into Dante’s Inferno or that horrible place of
eternal conscious torment that was once described to me in a sermon. Those are
simply examples of people trying to nail down the description of something that
cannot be described in human terms.

I also do not
doubt that Jesus warned us against going astray in this life – that there are
actions you can take that you should avoid at any cost. I also believe that he
warned that one of the consequences of such actions would be that you were
thrown upon a garbage heap that I suspect represented rejection and alienation
from God, but I am not certain he intended to mean to include eternal conscious
torment. In other words, I would say that I believe in hell, I am just not
entirely certain that hell means exactly what Christian tradition has said that
it means.

But more
important than that, I do not believe that the God I have come to know through
Jesus Christ is one who is all that interested in motivating us to be good
through a carrot and stick approach. Yes, he is looking for certain things from
us and rejoices when we trust him, act in faith and work for the kingdom of God
in this world. But God, like any good parent, knows that the threat of
punishment can only do so much to shape a child’s behaviours and is not
actually all that helpful at teaching the child to internalize the values of
the parent. God doesn’t just want to control our actions, he wants to transform
us. That is why he sent Jesus, that is why he raised him from the dead and
promised that we would be raised too. It is all about grace and love and God
believing in us, not about him scaring us into behaving in certain ways with
the threat of hell.

That is why I
would say that, whatever exactly it means, hell or Gehenna should not be at the
centre of our thinking about the afterlife. The Christian life is not about
avoiding punishment. It is not even really about a heavenly reward. It is about
meeting a God whose love for us (made real in Jesus Christ) is so powerful that
it can transform our here and now.

140WordSermon Jesus spoke
of Gehenna (translated: hell) but what did he mean by it & and how do we
respond to it? That is another question.

The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada is coming up very soon. This year there will be some debates on the agenda, yet again, about the place of LGBTQ people in the church. So, of course, the discussion boards of the church had been pretty active lately with people posting and discussing these weighty matters. I hardly want to spend all my time attending to these discussions, but I can’t help tuning in from time to time.

Lately, as you may have noticed, people who are strongly opposed to making any changes in our policies at this time, had been taking to labeling those they disagree with as “revisionists.” I don’t want to presume that this is their intention, but I can’t help but notice it often comes across as a pejorative label. They seem to be thinking, every time that they say it, that they are the true believers and that those who disagree with them are merely revising a time honoured approach to the Bible and to truth.